It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffserver, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding, streaming and playing

The FFmpeg project tries to provide the best technically possible solution for developers of applications and end users alike. To achieve this we combine the best free software options available. We slightly favor our own code to keep the dependencies on other libs low and to maximize code sharing between parts of FFmpeg. Wherever the question of "best" cannot be answered we support both options so the end user can choose.

Security is a high priority and code review is always done with security in mind. Though due to the very large amounts of code touching untrusted data security issues are unavoidable and thus we provide as quick as possible updates to our last stable releases when new security issues are found.

Everyone is welcome in FFmpeg and all contributions are welcome too. We are happy to receive patches, pull requests, bug reports, donations or any other type of contribution.

FFmpeg provides various tools:

ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert multimedia files between formats.

ffserver is a multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts.

ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and the FFmpeg libraries.

ffprobe is a is a simple multimedia stream analyzer.

and developers libraries:

libavutil is a library containing functions for simplifying programming, including random number generators, data structures, mathematics routines, core multimedia utilities, and much more.

libavcodec is a library containing decoders and encoders for audio/video codecs.

libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for multimedia container formats.

libavdevice is a library containing input and output devices for grabbing from and rendering to many common multimedia input/output software frameworks, including Video4Linux, Video4Linux2, VfW, and ALSA.